Now that ASF went live, what do you think of it?

[Mezmera]

4 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

You're talking about two different things. One concerns actual buffs to your character, the other is nothing but a tool to calculate your DPS.

 

That fight is the toughest 8 man endgame fight at the moment, does it not deserve some sort of reward?  They could have awarded something as mundane as spoiled milk and people would still complain they are gated and can't add this item to their base fridge. 

 

It's a cute little toy that does nothing for those that have a thorough build for such a challenge, I'd much rather get rewarded with more powah since this fight has more appeal to powah gamers.  It's a base item that travels with you for when you want to take out your frustrations, like when devs add some seemingly impossible challenge for an item you wanted since issue 1.

[Bill Z Bubba]

Just now, Mezmera said:

That fight is the toughest 8 man endgame fight at the moment, does it not deserve some sort of reward?

 

Of course it does. I would prefer that it not grant a reward that should have been a fundamental tool accessible in game from day fucking one.

[Zeraphia]

Hmm, my personal thoughts on this task force after running it as a duo the very first time blindly with a friend and the second time as a speed run are that:

 

• It has a lot of really interesting mechanics (especially when the car teleports you to another dimension hehe)
• I don't think it's really that difficult although if you're not careful you may suffer some deaths. I think it's plainly obvious defense-based builds are more favored in this task force than resistance-based builds, so it brings in more shine to sets like SR/Shield rather than the meta Rad Armor, which I appreciate.
• While I have to admit I didn't get all the references in the story, I did get a number of them and I found them genuinely funny. 
• The rewards for the task force are acceptable and make it worthy of running on a rotation. 
• I think the length of the task force is also great because you are not as time-locked to this task force as say Synapse or Quarterfield if you have a set amount of playtime. 
• There is optional difficulty spikes you can choose to do if you're up for a challenge but are not obligated to.

 

Overall, I think this is an A+ task force and it makes me want to play the game again as someone who hasn't been as active lately. While I realize incarnate powers are likely going to undo whatever challenge is thrown at us, I think it is an excellent addition to the game.

[Hew]

5 hours ago, Zeraphia said:

I think it's plainly obvious defense-based builds are more favored in this task

You arent playing on the same difficulty I am then... (melt armor much?! 😐 )

 

I should probably clarify. On  higher level difficulties, you have to deal with a wide variety of not-fun debufs, from smelters, to stuns, taunts, those nasty grenades, defense-ignoring attacks/mechanics. 

 

Relentless is _truly_ relentless.

Edited December 17, 2021 by Hew

[Coyotedancer]

15 hours ago, A Cat said:

I think you can actually. If you all log and do not quit team or quit tf, you should all be able to pick up from wherever you were last. What helps here is that you are playing with an SG, that is family to boot! Schedule coordination would actually be possible. 

 

It works, but it also prevents you from doing some other things with the characters in the meantime, unfortunately...

 

We only play together on Saturday afternoons, so that might be a bit of a complication if it took us several weekly sessions to complete. I'd see some definite push-back from MiddleCoyoteNephew in particular over being locked out of running AE arcs on his own with his go-to favorite. 

 

In the end, this just isn't a great content choice for us. But it doesn't have to be.

There are plenty of other things for us to zark and fry and throw rocks at, after all. 

[Linea]

Quote

I think it's plainly obvious defense-based builds are more favored in this task

It's balanced toward layered mitigation.  If anything it's balanced slightly in favor of Resist Capped Brutes and Tanks, with supplemental defense and/or buffs, with durability biased builds instead of DPS biased builds.  Resist is RDR. Resist cap is the best RDR. 

 

If you go in Defense capped without resists to back you up, you're gonna be resist floored and taking quad damage in a blink.  Which in turns means near instant death to Relentless Gold Bricker Alpha.  If you're defense based you better back it up with as much resist as you can get.  On the upside Defense based means you get half your DDR for free.

 

If you go in Resist capped, without any defenses, or DDR, you will get defense debuffed at least some, if they drop you too far into the red, you can end up facing double damage.  That's not as bad as the quad damage above, but it's still lethal.   You need at least some defense (or buffs) to offset that, and preferably some DDR (ageless radial) to go with it.

Edited December 17, 2021 by Linea

[Mezmera]

6 hours ago, Linea said:

It's balanced toward layered mitigation.  If anything it's balanced slightly in favor of Resist Capped Brutes and Tanks, with supplemental defense and/or buffs, with durability biased builds instead of DPS biased builds.  Resist is RDR. Resist cap is the best RDR. 

 

If you go in Defense capped without resists to back you up, you're gonna be resist floored and taking quad damage in a blink.  Which in turns means near instant death to Relentless Gold Bricker Alpha.  If you're defense based you better back it up with as much resist as you can get.  On the upside Defense based means you get half your DDR for free.

 

If you go in Resist capped, without any defenses, or DDR, you will get defense debuffed at least some, if they drop you too far into the red, you can end up facing double damage.  That's not as bad as the quad damage above, but it's still lethal.   You need at least some defense (or buffs) to offset that, and preferably some DDR (ageless radial) to go with it.

 

Yes it is very much layered.  First and foremost on the tougher difficulties you want to get as much survivability as you can no matter if you're the lead tank or follow along melee.  There's much more aggro than the tank can entertain so it's good to have a survivable character yourself.  

 

With my Shield tank I take One With the Shield and the melee resist hybrid so that I have extra resistance in reserve so if they ever go debuffing my resist it generally stays near the resistance cap for everything.  Shield tanks have better access to capping their positional defenses but not in the harder difficulties so I took Unleash Potential to get me back over the top in case the team is light on defense buffers and maneuvers plus I have Demonic just in case.  The only thing shield doesn't really bring to the party is a heal so I make up for it with Rebirth and Unrelenting.  

 

Even with all of this I can only put my heel into the ground for so long if the rest of the team takes a wipe and isn't around to help get rid of targets for a prolonged amount of time.  As high of a layered balance you can get is optimal playing to your strengths of the AT while also getting as best damage you can.     

Edited December 17, 2021 by Mezmera

[tidge]

23 minutes ago, Mezmera said:

Even with all of this I can only put my heel into the ground for so long if the rest of the team takes a wipe and isn't around to help get rid of targets for a prolonged amount of time.  As high of a layered balance you can get is optimal playing to your strengths of the AT while also getting as best damage you can.     

 

I was PUGging with a SG, and it took them a while to realize this^.  It is easy to "jump in" and not realize what you are actually up against.

 

I've not tried to be a tank on the ASF yet, but I HAVE found myself "supporting" a tank in ways I can't be certain that the tank realized it needed help. As I wrote earlier: My Fortunata ended up leaning VERY heavy into controls and confuses, and my Stalker had to make sure to target very specific enemies. I'm not ashamed to admit that my other characters were less suited to switch up against specific targets in giant spawns, so in those circumstances I was making sure to pass Insps to teammates as I was trying not to get aggro myself.

 

[Lazarillo]

31 minutes ago, tidge said:

I was PUGging with a SG, and it took them a while to realize this^.  It is easy to "jump in" and not realize what you are actually up against.

I think this is one place where some of the "help text" could fixed up a bit.  When the screen screams at you "NOVA FIST, BACK AWAY FROM MARAUDER" you basically know what's coming and what you need to do about it.  When it tells you "DIMENSIONAL BREACH DETECTED", that is decidedly less helpful, especially when there's another "DISTORTED DIMENSIONS" that fires around the same time.  It's, like, playing tells me that one of those is probably warning me that those one boss types is about to do the whirlypool thing, and the other is telling me that the whirlypool is already happening, but neither really queues me in to whether it can be prevented or how to stop it (and once I'm spinning around said NPC, it's kind of pointless to tell me I'm spinning around him).

 

In fairness to whoever wrote these, it's not like we didn't already seen these unhelpful help texts in things like the Sutter TF, so this is practically tradition now.  But it does leave one wondering why they bothered, just as it did before.

[Ukase]

So, I've just come from running this on Relentless. 

I was the last person to arrive, on a fire/rad corruptor. 

The team comp was...6 other corruptors and one tank. We tried to get the tank say "Scourge" with every attack, but that didn't quite pan out. 

If I ever do this again, I'll try to make some targeting macros ahead of time. Shimmerings, the Scientists in the first mission, Rifters, Brickernauts...the specific AVs, all pretty hard to find in a crowd. Just tabbing through took some time. 

I'll say this - Relentless is a poor name for it. Stupid is the word you were probably looking for. I say Stupid because inspirations were disabled. Now why would you do that, after beefing up the npcs? Oh well, saved me some button mashing - except, I had brought supers. Then, thinking supers are disabled, "Okay, I'll use AH and overpay to get some large Insps right now".  Those damn things were disabled, too. Whatever. Stupid is my term for it. You allow incarnates, but you disable inspirations. That doesn't make sense to me. But, lately a lot of things in game don't make sense to me. My fault for not reading more carefully. Moving on. 

The first four missions are fairly simple. Nothing terribly complicated if you're not pursuing badges. 

The last ripple where you're fighting Lady Gray, Dark Shadow, etc - it was pretty dull once Incandescence goes down. I don't see the excitement here. You get taunted by Hero 1, which is super annoying, but I get it, nothing we haven't dealt with before. But they're all just a big bag of hit points. They don't seem to do anything special, nothing exciting, no clever dialogue that I could tell. It's just button mashing, and the only real strategy is to use barrier on rotation. A yawn fest. Except that one group teleport..right beneath Hero 1's size 14 boot. Nice. I'm still traumatized, lol. 

Oh, before Incan and Hero 1 (and the others if you chose to fight them) - there's Glacia and Infernia. Why these two are such push-overs escapes me. They really should be quite pissed, given how many times many of us deliberately let them die to progress the TF forward more quickly. I would have expected some dialogue on that, too. Still consistently talkative, so I guess there's that. 

On Ripple Surge, it's nice that it count towards Gremlin defeats. I would love it if the shimmering patch that's left on the ground were more clearly defined. On my system, anyway, it's very hard to tell where Ripple's feet clearly are. They could be on the patch, or they could be his feet. It could use some more distinction, that's all. 

As far as it being challenging, the content isn't. What's challenging is taking a bunch of speed runners and having them all stick together. That is what's challenging. It still only took about an hour, and only a few defeats across the board. About 20 defeats in all, I think. Maybe 30. More than I expected, given the group. That one group teleport..right beneath Hero 1's size 14 boot. Nice. I'm still traumatized, lol. 

What really puzzled me was the pay off. A hami raid can get me 4 emp merits. So can this. If I'm chasing emp merits...the hami raid is the least hassle. Of course, a number of Astrals dropped, quite a few, so maybe it's not that bad. Seems to me the reward merits should be a lot higher, when contrasting with other content. Also, the influence for killing these AVs..dunno, seems like it should be more, since they're all souped up.

Nothing at all wrong with the story from what I could tell. A little long, but that's on the chosen difficulty setting. 

 

 

[Ironblade]

17 hours ago, Ukase said:

On Ripple Surge, it's nice that it count towards Gremlin defeats. I would love it if the shimmering patch that's left on the ground were more clearly defined. On my system, anyway, it's very hard to tell where Ripple's feet clearly are. They could be on the patch, or they could be his feet. It could use some more distinction, that's all.

Tell me about it.  This is the ONLY badge I'm still missing for Master.  Every time: "Huh, it LOOKED like he was in the patch."

[Mezmera]

48 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

Tell me about it.  This is the ONLY badge I'm still missing for Master.  Every time: "Huh, it LOOKED like he was in the patch."

 

The one I feel most bad about is the last one where your team can't be allowed to get touched by the blue.  I get the mechanics of it and all and have this no problem but it really is a hard one for the team to achieve out of all of these badges particularly if you don't congregate with people that badge and communicate well enough.  

 

I was up late the other night just goofing off around Aeon and had one of our Korean gamers ask me to help them get that badge.  Between the language barrier, the mechanics and having to depend so much on teammates paying attention I felt bad telling them that it's much tougher than just me being able to help, they'll need a team aware of how best to get this one, which would be harder to get people for this so late on a pug.

 

Of all of the badges I'd like to see this one toned down, it can create tension and animosity.  

[Ukase]

2 hours ago, Mezmera said:

it really is a hard one for the team to achieve out of all of these badges particularly if you don't congregate with people that badge and communicate well enough.  

Hopefully, this one will be easier after they patch it. For now, I'm trying to remember how often those blue patches fall - and if Incadescence could be used in the same way as many do on Keyes. Since there's no timer, folks could all pause in that hallway before the fight begins and slot incan if they had something else slotted instead. 

Edited December 22, 2021 by Ukase

[reisma]

On 12/21/2021 at 7:41 PM, Ukase said:

I'll say this - Relentless is a poor name for it. Stupid is the word you were probably looking for. I say Stupid because inspirations were disabled. Now why would you do that, after beefing up the npcs? Oh well, saved me some button mashing - except, I had brought supers. Then, thinking supers are disabled, "Okay, I'll use AH and overpay to get some large Insps right now".  Those damn things were disabled, too. Whatever. Stupid is my term for it. You allow incarnates, but you disable inspirations. That doesn't make sense to me. But, lately a lot of things in game don't make sense to me. My fault for not reading more carefully. Moving on. 
 

Being surprised at the reuse of a term (Relentless) that previously had a different meaning for much of the game's original life isn't your fault.